Haavard Nord
Trolltech
www.trolltech.com
It's a bit of a misnomer to call Trolltech an up-and-comer, since it spent 10 years building a nice little business selling support for esoteric Linux developer tools. Like MySQL, it was one of the first companies to prove you could build a profitable business by giving much of your software away for free -- charging only when customers use it to build a proprietary, commercial product. It generated about $14 million in revenue last year and is set to grow to about $21 millionin 2005.
But the Norway-based company is now reinventing itself and going after the much larger mobile-phone business. While Microsoft may never be dislodged from its dominance of the desktop market, the battle over what operating system to put on increasingly more advanced mobile phones is just playing out -- and Linux is a strong contender. Trollech makes development tools called Qtopia, which run on top of Linux on cell phones, helping developers tweak, modify and add to the operating system.
Trolltech just scored a second venture-capital round of $6.7 million, and it has opened an office in Beijing as part of its bid to be in the middle of the handset business. Already it has a contract with Motorola, which is using Trolltech's software on six phones running Linux. "We think this is going to explode in the next 12 months," says Haavard Nord, chief executive. If Nord is right, his company may be one of the first startups to win at the open-source game twice.